A funny thing did not happen at work: Humor styles are not strongly correlated with vocational interests

Abstract

The role of humor in the workplace has received great attention. What is less known is how humor, specifically humor styles, correlate with vocational interests. Based on self-report responses from a community sample of 567 adults, we explored the relationships between humor styles and vocational interests. Affiliative humor style scores correlated positively with some artistic interests including performing arts and author-journalism. Self-enhancing humor style scores had moderate significant correlations with interests in adventure, nature-agriculture, and medical service. The aggressive humor style was positively associated with interests in science and had negative correlations with work styles such as accountability, planfulness, and job security. The self-defeating humor style was not strongly associated with vocational interests. When humor styles were added, with sex and age, in regression models, six of the seven vocational interest factors had significant predictions but only two models had at least one humor style significantly contributing, with the variance accounted ranging from 5% to 11%. The biology interest factor was significantly predicted by the self-enhancing humor style scores and the work style factor was significantly predicted by lower aggressive humor style scores. In general, these results suggest that humor styles are not strongly correlated with vocational interests.